User:Fasten/TestWiki

TestWiki as been added as a request for enhancement to the Wikimedia bugtracker: #17129

License

The project was originally intended as a CSL project but seems to be too useful for the OLPC itself. The license will probably be GPL+CSL.

TestWiki

The TestWiki (working title) will allow to generate multiple-choice tests and other tests in a wiki and to annotate those tests publicly or privately using the wiki syntax.

Tags of the TestWiki syntax will be in their own sub-namespace "Test":

{{Test::Tag}}

Question types

Question types will include multiple-choice, grouping, table choice, ordering and comparison with expressions. A complex question will be able to combine several questions types (e.g. making a comparison the right answer in a multiple-choice test or a multiple-choice test inside an ordering question, possibly with different choices depending on the order of items)

The software will be able to ask questions out of order and will keep track of successful answers to questions, showing successfully answered questions less often. The software will also be able to mix questions from several modules.

Questions will allow to specify a pool of right and wrong answers from which only a small subset is shown in each test question. The order of the questions will also be permuted randomly. (Answering the test isn't learned based on the structure and layout of the test).

Categories

TestWiki will allow to group tests into course modules with the module tag:

{{Test::Module|<page>}}

The module tag marks content as part of a course module which is described on the wiki page <page>. Additionally test authors and users will be able to add their own non-standard categories independently. (Every user will have his own namespace of categories and will be able to ignore author categories.)

Module page

A module information page can use the following tags:

{{Test::Topic|<name>|<description>}} - the topic of a module

{{Test::Publisher|<name>|url=<url>}} - the publisher of a module

{{Test::License|<name>|url=<url>}} - the license for a module

{{Test::URL}} - the home page of a module (e.g. a wiki that publishes the test)

{{Test::Version|<major>|<minor>|<patchlevel>|<date>}}

{{Test::Module|<page>}} - a containing module, unspecified information are inherited from this module.

Tags

{{Test::}}-tags will be invisible or appear as customizable markup when a test page is displayed with the MediaWiki software.

{{Test::Item|<name>}} is the beginning of a test item.

Parameters:

difficulty - the difficulty parameter assigns a numerical difficulty between 0 and 0x7ffffff (usually 0 to 10).

option - the option parameter can specify an identifier (a short word) that can be used to add or remove the question from a test scenario (as an option).

{{Test::Q|<id>}} is the beginning of a question. A test can have several questions in order to phrase the same test item in different ways. Each question is followed by its own list of answers.

{{Test::A|<id>}} is the beginning of an answer to the previous question.

Test format

Tests will be formatted in XML in order to allow a well-defined and exchangeable database format for test databases.

Templates could optionally generate XML tags, so the generation of the test database would be a simple extraction of tags from a special output form of the wiki page.

Testing

Users can add their own comments in wiki format but during a test comments are only shown after a question has been answered. During a test conducted by a teacher the database of comments could be temporarily disabled or the pupils may be using a different computer.

Quiz extension

The syntax could be combined with that of the Quiz extension.

See also

• Multiple choice